CategoryEducation
Students Beware: AI Copilot Admits Errors But Won’t Correct Them
Parents and teachers must beware when students treat AI research as accurate; I myself was misled while writing this article!
AI in Education: Is the System Being Gamed — or the Student?
AI makes it easier to game the system, but many users are also being gamed
Campus Civil Rights Advocate: Free Speech Makes Us Safer
Greg Lukianoff stresses the importance of listening to people to know what they think
Which Way, Modern University? Jennifer Frey’s story
The shakeup at the University of Tulsa’s Honors College is a puzzler
How To Avoid AIM — the AI Moron Effect
The popularity of getting chatbots to produce assignments may be a signal that college doesn't matter as much as it used toA recent article by James D. Walsh at New York magazine worries that AI is dooming education — such as it is these days. In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a Read More ›
The Job Market is Telling Us Something About AI and Jobs…
But it’s not telling us the same things as the AI hypesters are telling us
Is the Reverse Flynn Effect — Declining Intelligence — Real?
IQ tests were never meant to measure memorization or familiarity, yet that’s precisely what’s happening
Ohio State to Require Students to Learn “AI Fluency”
The university is embracing, rather than rejecting, AIIf you can’t beat ’em, join ’em? Ohio State University recently announced that each of its students must take an AI skills class starting in the Fall of 2025. Micaiah Bilger of The College Fix reports, Every undergraduate major at Ohio State will include classes that incorporate “AI Fluency,” NBC 4 WCMH reports. The public university’s leaders have developed a strategy that they believe will equip students to use the technology both creatively and responsibly. As AI continues to shape and disrupt higher education, administrators and teachers have to grapple with how to deal with this powerful technology. Many reports, personal testimonies, and commentary illustrates how much students today depend on AI systems like ChatGPT to do their assignments. Professors, meanwhile, Read More ›
NYT Journalist: The “Download” Model of Knowledge is Flawed
We learn by wrestling with ideas, by paying attention and making connections.
LLMs Are Bad at Good Things, Good at Bad Things
LLMs may well become smarter than humans in the near future but not because these chatbots are becoming more intelligent
Does AI Expose Colleges’ Underlying Problem?
AI could be a symptom of a deeper issue in higher education
Becoming a Slave to Google: How It Happens
Part 4: After an update, you always have to second guess what Google did. You become a reverse engineer who never sees under the hood
Yes, Large Language Models May Soon be Smarter than Humans…
But not for the reason you think
Are Colleges Beyond Saving?
They need to rediscover the purpose of higher education
A Library Without Books Is Like a Book Without Pages
There is a disturbing new phenomenon afoot – babies and toddlers are turning up at nurseries and schools not knowing what books are, or how to use them
Michael Shermer: Wokeness Poisons Science and I Am No Longer Woke
A number of well-known one-way skeptics and atheists are beginning to feel the consequences of prescribed insufferable virtue
Chegged Out: How ChatGPT Schooled a Study Giant
AI has transformed how students approach both learning and cheatingAI is going to both create and destroy businesses. An interesting victim of AI is the academic assistance business. Academic dishonesty, the dark side of academic assistance, is a fancy term for cheating. With profit-motivated websites like Chegg.com, cheating became easier. When taking an exam, a student could take a photo of a difficult problem and send it to Chegg. In literally minutes, the student would be sent the answer over a cell phone. How do they do it? Often Chegg employs smart nerds from poor countries who, by local standards, are paid big bucks for their efforts. To use Chegg, a subscription is needed. But why include a human in the loop when AI can give you a quicker Read More ›
Free Speech Report at Harvard: Professors Afraid to Speak Up
The elite college still fails to promote free speechPerhaps no sphere of society has become more vulnerable to “groupthink” than the modern American university. Concerns about free speech rights have long circled the discourse over the last couple of years, with cancel culture coming for everyone who even hints at heterodox viewpoints. Rikki Schlott, a writer for the New York Post, recently wrote a report on how some professors at Harvard University, the most prestigious academic institution in the United States, feel hemmed in by the prevailing campus consensus. At a place where the quest for truth is engraved on its founding banner, academics no longer feel comfortable doing just that: professing what they take to be different reflections on what counts as the truth. Schlott writes, Harvard Read More ›
